“Dakota”: Remediation of Electronic Literature

The modernist electronic piece of literature Dakota is a unique piece of literature that captivates the reader in a very unusual way. From the action-adventure type music, and the words coming at by you gives off a cinematic experience that I enjoy. I was pretty captivated and, had I more free time, would have “watched” the whole thing.

Jessica Pressman offers some interesting points about the cinematic type literature that I find particularly interesting. She notes in Digital Modernism “Dakota is exemplary of digital modernism because it adapts a literary text and technique from modernism in order to challenge the status quo of electronic literature and our assumptions about it” (81). The technique she refers to is the fact that this text “evades reader-controlled-interactivity”, which is what happens with the more cinematic experience of the text: it happens as soon as you press play with you or without you. It challenges the status quo of conventional aspects of electronic literature into the remediation of electronic literature. It really is an example of an evolutionary feature of electronic literature even though electronic literature has only been around for a little period of time compared to physical literature.

This brings me to another point about the evolution of electronic literature. I’ve never seen any literature like Dakota, nor have I imagined a text appearing like a movie flashing before my eyes. It’s intriguing. And now that I’ve seen it once, I definitely want to explore more of this non-conventional piece of electronic literature.

This screenshot is taken from the screen in which “Dakota” displays the text fading out of the camera in a cinematic way